Persistent modeling crashes with 2017

[Anonymous]

I've been giving Max 2017 another go since installing SP3. Unfortunately, I'm still seeing lots of random modeling crashes. Mostly when using snapping in subobject mode in orthographic view. Max will freeze for a few seconds and crash, but it allows me to save a recovery file, so no work gets lost.

Still, it is deadly for the workflow.

I've been sending reports every time and making sure these are marked with my email address. Can someone at the Autodesk end look into them and let me know what they think?

[companioncube]

noticed same. it's a shame because last few versions have been really stable when modeling. 

[Anonymous]

Had three crashes this morning in the space of 30 minutes. All while pulling and pushing vertices. So I'm reverting back to 2016. It seems more and more likely that 2017 will be the first version of Max since 2009 that I have to skip completely. And it's not for lack of trying.

[info_1]

It's really bad-

Service pack 3 seemed to help  but it's still been doing the (not responding) thing about every 20 - 30 minutes regardless of the scene or what I'm doing.

I'm running involuntary windows 10.  Is it more stable with windows 7?

soooo much money sent to Autodesk over the years.

[Anonymous]

Anyone at Autodesk care to help here?

[Anonymous]

Oh well. Anyway, 2018 is almost around the corner...

[Anonymous]

So I guess the message from Autodesk is to skip 2017. In that case, any ideas about how to obtain a refund for that year?

[Anonymous]

And to add insult to injury, I even got a botmail from Autodesk this morning asking if they could close my thread now that I had a solution. Ha!

[Anonymous]

Hi Bertrand!

I hope someone from AD will reply here, I also want a refund. I also gave another go to max 2017 and it's unusable here too: lots of crashes and can't install the update on my render nodes. I'll do a post for my problem too.

[Anonymous]

Yeah. It's a complete mess. And from the absence of response here, I'm worried AD has no clue how they broke it and no idea about how fixing it.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello everyone,

I'm never ignoring anyone, I just have a heavy case load past two weeks.  I can see that caused some problems in a few threads.  Please in the future if you ever find that you haven't gotten a reply and you should have, drop an @ symbol and my name and it'll email me directly and I'll appear.  I sometimes answer threads with no posts in them first so that the ball can keep rolling, but I should have posted in here sooner.  Ok, that being said...

I've gone ahead and done a search for each of your report buckets and I can list what is crashing here below.

@Anonymous,

I don't have any reports from the email address used in your Area profile.  Is it possible you used a different address?  If so, you can PM it to me to keep it private.  Or, you can post the report number and that works too.  

@companioncube

Same issue, I have no reports by your email address.  Other address used?  Or, you can post the report number and that works too.  

@info_1

1. You are having DX11 crashes, so you may have a better time using DX9 for the time being.  This may be related to a plugin, but it's hard to tell.  You might check to see if you can find a DX repair process for W10.  (or run a dxdiag and see if there are any problems reported.)
2. You are having a crash related to the above crash (two step) that is 100% limited to Windows 10.  This is with a .dll called ogsdevicedx11.  Again, DX9 or making sure that .dll isn't be blocked by W10 or Windows Defender may help here.  Presence of W10 AU can reset security settings, so might be worth looking at. 
3. You are also having a system exception error that has been logged and is unable to be reproduced.  If you have steps to repro it would help a lot.  To answer the question in your report... 89% of these crashes come from W10.  Your last 3 crashes submitted were from this issue.  10/10/2016 1:59:16 PM, 10/10/2016 1:58:16 PM, 10/10/2016 1:52:35 PM.  I have tried to repro this and failed.  Related to hardware?  It might help if you could list your system specs. 

@Anonymous,

Same issue, I have no reports by your email address.  Other address used?  Or, you can post the report number and that works too.  

Best Regards,

[info_1]

Thanks, Alfred-

I'll try DX 9.

the other stuff I might try  and figure out when i have a minute.

I have been trying out a GTX 1080 (most recent Nvidia driver) rather than my quadro K4200. The 1080 seemed to be playing nice with R2016.

I was considering doing a clean reinstall of windows 7 pro from the old OEM disk. That's an all day project and then some, but if you think Max and AutoCAD will work as well or better I'll do it as soon as I have some down time.

Thanks-

Ed

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Thank you for the update @info_1,

I've had 2 cases where the people were having issues with their 1080 cards, but the vast majority are running fine.  Both of those people had two of the same crash errors that you are showing for yours. Correlation does not imply causation but it's worth noting.  If you have any other 3D apps crashing, you might want to double check your power cables to the card or re-seat it in the M/B.  If your other 3d apps work fine, then it may be a driver issue or using DX9 could help.  

In an official sense I can't play favorites with OS's.  But I will say that for my personal work I used windows 2000 64 until about 6-7 years ago and will use Win7 until it's no longer supported.  

Best Regards,

[info_1]

Thanks-

Very very helpful.

[Anonymous]

Alfred, just sent you a PM. I'm using a different email for the reports. FWIW, I'm using a GTX Titan X (Maxwell) on Windows 10.

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

Thank you for the message and email address, I very much appreciate it.  Can you please confirm you current SP?  Here's what I found:

1) You have a crash that seems to be related to the saving of bad poly data.  It may be caused by a plugin (may not), but it is currently being looked at by the devs.  This was only on one of your reports and is pretty rare with only 6 reports ever.  (Bucket 32826481)  

2) You are having a crash ogsdevices as well, but this one isn't the same as the one info_1 had, and isn't specifically related to any OS.  This is the 2nd most common crash with 2017 and it's high on the list of important fixes. It does have a bug report associated with it and has lots of comment activity in the tracker.  This one seems to be 100% a Max issue.

3) You have one that was fixed by the latest service pack... so it's a bit odd to see it on here.  Have you upgraded to SP3?  If so, it's a bit strange and I'll make a note for it.  The Titan Black is the card listed with the most reports here (but not by much), might be a driver issue.  (Bucket 31474859)  There is a 2nd crash related to this same bucket, but of a different sort.  The Titan is 50% of those crashes, but the total number of reports isn't high enough for that to be statistically significant.  (10/21 reports.)  It seems to point toward driver issues.  

4) You had 2 crashes caused by Vray for 2016 last month.  1 by the bitmap buffer, and 1 by the renderer itself and they seem to be related to the windows kernel.  What's very odd is you are the only person ever with this report.  That might indicate driver or a system cause, and I've never actually seen a report with only 1 person affected before.

I hope this helps a bit.  There are at least 1 or 2 things here that seem to be purely Max problems.  The others may be driver related, and maybe testing some of the other drivers might help.  

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Hi Alfred,
Thanks for the update. Yes, I'm on SP3. Are you sure that crash 3) happened after SP3 was rolled out? It might be an older report.
I wouldn't worry about the Max 2016 reports. Crashes there are very rare and usually when I do something stupid.
2017 is a whole different beast. For me it's been way too crash-prone to be of any use, not to mention the selection weirdness, when Max refuses to select some edges in sub object mode. I know a lot of people on the V-Ray forum complain the about this.
Any other suggestion about what I should do beyond updating my Titan driver?

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

All of the reports were from the last 30 days, I did another search expanding to 90 and it's all the same modules that are crashing.  I have a screenshot here just for verification purposes.  

The truth is that I think a lot of the bugs that are coming up for people are coming from W10.  I can say with confidence that the vast majority of my unsolved cases regarding crashing, weird issues, etc. are coming from Windows 10.   The selection one you mentioned is definitely one of them, and it's OS agnostic.   I logged that issue myself and it's been getting some comments and attention recently behind the scenes.  The physical camera has some issues as well, no doubt about it.  

The only thing I can suggest right now is to look for any reasons why W10 might block access to .dlls at certain times.  This seems to be the central part of the crashes people get, or startup issues, etc. Running as admin would certainly help.  There are also some good ideas on this page which talks about blocked .dlls for maxwrappers that could be applied to just about any permissions problems with W10.  2017 does put a lot more stress and instructions toward video cards than previous versions, so stable drivers are super important.  I keep every thread I post into in Outlook, so if a solution comes up I will post back in those threads.  If I learn anything new I will update you here.  

Best Regards,

[Anonymous]

Alfred, let me say you're a ray of light in a very dark place. I do appreciate your patience and general kindness as a person.

That said, let me turn back into my professional, irascible self: Why would Windows 10 be such a problem when Max 2016 and 2015 have been working flawlessly under Windows 10 since I upgraded from Windows 7? It's kind of ironic that Max 2017 is the only version that was developed once Windows 10 was actually out there, yet the only one that seems to be playing very badly with the OS. And it's not like any other software I'm using is having crashes on that scale. Old versions of Adobe's Creative Suite, ZBrush, Terragen, World Machine, Blender, Marvelous Designer, older Modo versions, etc. etc. are all stable. 

[Alfred.DeFlaminis]

Hello @Anonymous,

This is a good question.  I'm not a developer so I'm not really in a good position to answer that.  I guess wrong and suddenly everyone is upset and posting this everywhere as proof of something or other.  I'm very happy that 2016 and 2015 are working flawlessly on W10 for you, I've had many posts about them having issues on W10 in my short time here.  (For example permission problems with maxwrapper.dll).  I think W10 has pretty good legacy support which is a great feather in the hat of W10.   I have seen your crash logs so I totally understand that you are having some pretty extreme issues.

If older versions of those software you listed are working fine I can only assume it's because they rely on more stable versions of .dlls and drivers. The google search for .net 4.6 and other problems is pretty huge, and this search (and the previous link) are just for the last 30 days.  If you do a search for newer versions of some of those that software you listed and W10, you'll find that some of them also have a fair amount of issues with W10 also.  I didn't link any because I don't want to point out problems with competitors and partners products.  

Does that mean all the problems are due to the OS?  Of course not, I'm just trying to demonstrate that these sorts of things always happen with new OS's and drivers.  I can say with certainty is that the devs are aware of the issues and working on them.  I remember these same types of issues in many different software when Vista first came out. 

Best Regards,